The angst is over for Seattle Post Intelligencer employees as they finally learned the fate of their paper today. Tuesday will be the final print edition. It will continue on as a web only publication.
As the publisher stated: “Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time… but the bloodline will live on.” You can see his comments as he addressed news staff this morning on the P-I Website, as well as a detailed story.
Only a professional news staff of about 20 or 25 will stay on for the online venture. The majority of the paper’s 167 employees will lose their jobs.
The P-I lost $14 million last year. On January 9, Hearst put the paper up for sale, but no buyers materialized. The company has also said they would put another one of their papers, the S.F. Chronicle up for sale or even shut it down, if cost-cutting measures implemented recently don’t drastically reduce their operating costs.